TWELVE MINUTES

by Kathryn Hewitt

  How could this be me? My thought was punctuated by the clank produced by Diane’s tossing of the comb onto her tray, before she meticulously folded up the specimen collection, sealing and marking it appropriately. As I watched her blue nitrile gloves writing my name across a biohazard label, Last, First, and Middle Initial, I couldn’t deny the reality of the situation.

  There was only one Cassandra Lila Warren. Cassandra L. Warren. Cass.

  “It gets worse.” That was all that Diane said as she put down her pen and picked up a speculum. I was a conscientious patient who had visited the gynecologist countless times, but no one liked the speculum.

  The jelly that Diane squirted onto the plastic instrument, then to her fingers, was just as cold as it looked as she applied it and inserted the speculum. The pebble embedded in my left cheek was beginning to cut the soft skin. The smell of the grass and dry leaves competed with cinnamon. My bruised hips were being re-bruised as his grip changed and re-tightened.

  “Cass?” Diane looked concerned as she stood before me, her camera set aside and her gloves removed. “I think you may have lost consciousness. I know this is very hard, I can’t imagine how hard, but based on my many patients,” she shook her head sadly, “I think I have an idea. Anyway, I continued the exam and photographed all abrasions, external and internal, as well bruising and swelling. You are going to be sore, honey.” Her brows knit together again, and I felt bad for making her so sad. I was already quite sore, and this was with the help-myself Demerol coursing through my veins.

  “I have taken specimen scrapings of your cervix, your vaginal canal, and your vulva. I had to use a lot of special light sources, but you didn’t seem to mind.” She smirked and I felt like maybe in a far off universe I could begin to comprehend amusement. “I also scraped your nails for evidence. I need to tell you now that there will be tests run for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. …” Diane allowed the silence to blare as long as I needed. She must have seen a change in my expression because she determined it safe to continue.

  “Cass?” I simply nodded as best I could. “Well, if you want to know more details of the exam I did on you, call me at any time.” She honestly looked like she meant it, as if I’d call her at 4am and ask, “The small bald patch behind my right ear, you did that because…?” and she’d just cheerfully launch into an explanation of hair comparisons and follicles and DNA.

  I’d roll my eyes and secretly admire her if I had met her yesterday… Yesterday. Yesterday was not yesterday, but in fact three days ago.

  Another thing He stole from me: Time.

  “Now, Cass, that stuff was bad, but the next will be painful. I’m going to need you to stand up and let me photograph your back.”

  …On your back

  “I want to see your pretty face.”

  “I’ll help you.” Diane moved to my good side and began the slow and agonizing process of getting me up and out of the bed. “Sorry Cass,” Diane huffed, as she practically carried my whole weight, “I usually have the orderlies move the patients. But in My Rooms, I find it best to keep the audience small.” She looked fleetingly proud when she said those two words, and I remotely appreciated that for her.

  Finally standing, swaying, but standing, I realized that I was still ass naked and freezing. Forgetting, I tried to wrap my arms around myself only to re-discover the intentional, and not so intentional, immobility of my right side. Giving up, I focused on keeping my balance and not turning into a Cassicle.

  After what felt like an eternity…no, I remembered what an eternity felt like…for what seemed to be an excessively extended period of time, I drowned myself in the click click click of Diane’s camera. Withdrawing to a world where they were simply clock ticks, or metronome clicks, not a stranger taking pictures of what I wondered if I could ever look at myself. Simultaneously, I felt possessive of my body. Irrationally maybe, but it did not feel good to have the pictures taken. I felt like they were taking what little I had left of me.

  Did Cass die on that vacant patch of dirt and detritus, with only the hint of cinnamon to guide my passage?

  “I’m done.” Diane snapped the lens cap onto her camera, one more click to make my skin crawl.

  Gently, she swathed me in the gown, expertly avoiding my injuries and tying it up correctly and completely. Slowly guiding me back to bed, she tucked me in as she replaced the blankets over me, unable to mask her nurturing instinct.

  “There,” she said with finality. “Cass?” My eyes were closed and I wanted nothing more than for her to go away and let me run off into the sunset with my new husband Demerol. “Look at me.” My eyelid was so heavy, and the little that I had moved had my body screaming with pain. But, I did as she asked, cracking open my leaden lid, slowly and agonizingly painful.

  I think Diane lied.

  I think that this was the worst part.

  Meeting my gaze, her kind chocolate brown eyes stared too deeply into my one observable blue one. Corn-flower blue. Like my mom’s. “The hard part has just begun. You thought you fought? The fight has just begun. But you can always remember that when it came down to it, to the biggest fight of your life…” Diane held my stare and forced me to listen. “When it came down to it, you won. Cassandra, you won. No matter what is to come, you can handle it. You fought and you survived. You can survive anything now.” These words were meaningful, but I stashed them away to examine at a later, more lucid moment. “You survived. That’s your life preserver. Now, I’m not a licensed mental health worker, but I am a very good listener. I’m giving you my card with my cell phone and I want you to know that you can call me whenever or for whatever reason. I will always answer.”

  Kind of like a Rape Sponsor. I didn’t dare say that aloud.

  Diane put her card with my personal belongings on the little side table and turned to leave. As if thinking better of it, she returned to my side and grasped my left hand in her cool dry one. One tight squeeze, an exhalation through her nose, and then Nurse Michaels was no longer in the room.

  My last thought was that she was one of the good ones.

  EIGHT

  I now know what owls look like up close. I was greeted by a parliament of them when I was finally dry enough to open my eyes. Water was my only thought…ok maybe that wasn’t true. Thankfully, I didn’t have time to dwell; it’s a bit startling to wake up to 10 eyeballs, all familiar, and all laser pointed on you.

  Mom. Kara and James.

  “Hi Mom,” I croaked. My mom immediately started sobbing, like the really wet kind, and I stared at her in awe, first for how much she cared about me, and secondly because I knew that only my mother could cry like that and still come out put together and lovely.

  “I always say the wrong thing.” My face wasn’t working and the circumstance may have been inappropriate, but the absence of laughter at my first, be-it poor, attempt at a joke after…Just after…well no one likes to tank.

  And Dad and Joan. Huh.

  “Hi Dad,” I mustered. He was my dad. And it meant something to me that he and Joan had flown in after…well I guess my mom had called him. That should have been interesting. I wanted to laugh, or at least I felt like I should want to laugh, but with an immobilized face and a deep emptiness where I thought my heart should be, I couldn’t seem to understand why anyone would ever laugh. How anyone could ever laugh.

  “Hi honey,” my dad said in his surprisingly comforting Daddy voice, as he slowly approached me. I’d never seen my dad look so helpless. So…uncertain? My dad was the ultimate counterpart to my mom. As in, take charge, always in control, cool…planned. Uncertainty was a foreign emotion on my dad.

  It wasn’t a good look.

  He might look worse than me.

  It was the first time that I actually thought about what I looked like. Hey, I was no Miss America, but I did alright. I was cute, occasionally pretty, but generally good-looking. I kept my figure almost accidentally, my obsessive need to quell my thoughts through the catharsis of
running having a multi-directional impact on my life. So, I knew that I had a tight body, that it looked ‘good,’ but I wasn’t the type to flaunt it. I didn’t enjoy the games or sales tactics required to really be ‘out there.’ But I still liked my face. I loved my face. It was mine, and it was oval, not too harsh and not too soft, my dark hair and blue eyes a gift from my mother.

  Your pretty face…

  “Sweetheart,” My dad said, and then nothing. He’d run out of words. That was ok, so had I. I met his eyes and he looked so sad. I didn’t realize why, until he'd wiped away a tear that had run down my exposed cheek. I was so shocked that I was crying, I didn’t even absorb the fact that I’d been touched. My dad looked equally shocked, as if his finger had grown a mind of its own, and then his expression dissolved into remorse. I thought I should tell him that it was ok, to tell my daddy that he could always touch his daughter with affection, that such physical expression of love was wanted and expected.

  But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. It would have been a lie. I didn’t want him to feel like he could touch me at his discretion. In my rational mind, I knew that this was my dad, and that this was very irrational. But father or not, I felt this way toward everyone. I didn’t want anyone to feel entitled to touching me, at their will, at their inclination. The world had lost that privilege, because one man stole it.

  I had built an armor around myself, starting with the tiny amoeba in place of my heart, first cooing to it to gain its trust, coddling and encouraging. Then, once it lay supine and utterly vulnerable, I clapped a Titanium cage around it, tightly enough so as to inhibit its expansion. I dressed the tiny fairy enchanted prison in bandages, one for each part of my body that hurt, each itemized, followed by one for every thing He stole from me. This effectively stifled the drum that seemed to pound simultaneously inside my chest, and over-occupied head. To this mummified creation of captivity, I thought it prudent to wind a bit of barbed wire around its circumference, trimming it with a light frosting of lye.

  With each day, I made a silent vow.

  These vows would be a long time coming in their appearance in my journal that I kept for Rachel. However, unbeknownst to Rachel, but well guarded by Diane, was the fact that I kept a separate private journal. Diane knew when to keep her mouth shut, it was probably why she was still employed, and she understood my need to work some things out privately. As in, only another abuse victim could truly understand the need to keep something sacred, something of their own. Only we knew how Everything that had once been as such, had been ripped wide open, the contents spilled for all to see.

  I needed to salvage something for me; everything else had been stolen, ravaged, and exposed, from the psychological to the physical. My body was not even my own. Dozens of doctors and other various hospital staff had been privy to what no one outside of my family and best friends had ever seen. I’d never been especially modest, but modesty no longer existed in my world.

  Modesty.

  Another thing He stole from me.

  The list was getting too long, the weight of the endless scroll becoming too hard to bear. Was there nothing left? Had He left me with Nothing? I mean, who was I? Because as much as this categorization defined me now, I also refused to let it define me. Which left me feeling untethered, indefinable, lacking in tangible truths, and disenfranchised.

  So everyday I vowed that I would rediscover something about myself that he hadn’t touched. Sounded easy enough.

  NINE

  “So, what is it today? That he never got to see the color of your toenails?” Diane asked as she bustled through the door. We were three months into our status as the Odd Couple, and I had recently felt that I owed her an explanation as to why I had wanted her to bring me another journal. When I’d told her that it was for a friend, we’d both laughed. I couldn’t even pretend to pull that one off. “Hey, at least I got a chuckle out of you today.” Diane’s warm eyes had sparkled. I knew that her mood was a reflection of mine; I mean, who liked hanging out with a self-pitying, depressed, half-invalid? I added the ‘half,’ more for my own sanity. I had realized that Diane had bad days when I did, but by the law of averages, it had to work the other way around on occasion. I definitely knew that when Diane’s eyes were hollow, circled from nights of sleep deprivation and mental exertion, I was extra pissy. So my slight elevation was a windfall for the both of us.

  Taking the baton, I said, “That’s actually a good one. I’ll save it for when I’m pretty sure that he saw my soul.” It was a joke. I prayed that Diane’s overly perceptive eyes wouldn’t see the flashing neon light that said, “When it was happening, I felt like he was taking my soul.”

  I blacked out right then. Apparently. I was really good at it. Once I’d asked Rachel why I didn’t black out during my attack. Instead of informing me that my blackouts were a result of my trauma and thus began after the event, she said, “Would you rather that have happened?”

  “No,” I’d whispered. I’d needed to be there. As much as I wasn’t, as much as my mind fought its most gallant battle to protect what was of most value, Me, I was there. I was there for every huffed exhalation of cinnamon, for every scrape of one rib against another, every time He kissed me and I tasted Him and was there. I needed that. I needed to have the internal fire, as unimaginable damage was done to my most soft and fragile part. I’d say more fragile even than my heart, but the two were annihilated simultaneously.

  I needed to have felt the first blow, the agony that radiated across my face. I had to know what it was like to be kicked while lying prone, how to have my ‘good’ cheek grated by the rough ground and the movement of the Beast on top of me. I Especially needed to be there as I was taken with force, taken unawares, taken and stolen and broken.

  Do I wish that I could have missed the part where he’d thanked me reverently, in rhythm with his thrusts? Possibly. Do I fantasize that I could have blacked out and missed the whole horrendous event? I won’t say. But I needed to lay in bed and feel the course of his exploration of my breasts, seeing exactly the pattern he’d moved in, his rough fingertips stinging as their callouses scraped my delicate skin. I had to be aware enough at the time to feel him finish his mission, to understand that this had Happened. To completion. I needed to be able to know what it was like, what it felt like, what it smelled like, every infraction catalogued and in sequence, in order to one day be repurposed as building blocks to Me.

  I needed to have been there.

  But I never saw His face.

  TEN

  “He calls me Casandra.” I said this last part as I filled a glass at the sink, intentionally keeping my back to my mother.

  “Casandra?” I couldn’t tell by my mom’s tone if she was amused or bemused. I was glad that she couldn’t see my face, my rosebud cheeks an obvious instigator for an investigation.

  Without turning around, I rotated the faucet to the off position and took a long drink. I love water, and I actually get a little anxious if I don’t have a bottle of it with me when I’m out. My therapist says it’s a minor symptom of my PTSD, from all of those days after the surgeries when I was so thirsty, but restricted by medical indication and physical limitations. Some psychoanalysis about a final vestige of control having been stolen from me, or something. Even when I was allowed to drink as much water as I wanted (which mysteriously coincided with about the same time that I had stopped needing Nurse assistance to the bathroom), I still couldn’t get enough.

  Humiliation? Lord do I know it. After every invasion I'd endured, up through the surgeries and multitude of post-attack testing, or Vic-Sticks, as I liked to call them, the indignity of having to ask someone to wipe you every time that you needed to go to the bathroom was pretty low. As in, the treasure trove of Blue Ice at the bottom of the Mariana Trench after Flight Path rush hour, low.

  And feeling like blue ice at any altitude is pretty damn low.

  Swallowing deliberately, savoring the cool liquid sliding down my throat, I imagined the shimmery fl
uid coating my esophagus, and then my stomach, with mysticism and calm. Peace. That’s what I associated drinking water at my leisure with.

  So, having my Peace intruded upon was already annoying to me. But to be grilled about Charlie really rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I got it. My mom was worried. She’d been worried about me my whole life and nothing about that had changed. Except for the security cameras that she had installed at our house, the GPS she had wired into my car, the second cell phone “just in case yours dies,” and her need for me to call her ALL THE TIME. It’s love. I got it. My mom’s daughter had suffered the worst fate second only to death, and it would be the first and last time such an infraction would occur.

  But the thing was, I was the daughter who’d suffered the worst fate one could survive.

  I survived. I Survived.

  Only Rachel knows about my pact. My therapist asked if it had been with God, but I just shook my head. I wasn’t especially religious and it had been more than that. How so, Rachel had prodded. It was more than that. When I’d said that three times, Rachel had ended our session and given me an awesome ‘project.’ Therapists seriously had some odd ideas about what was fun. I was to define my agreement. I was to clarify to Rachel what the bargain had been and what it had meant to me, and (duh) thus be able to understand it better myself.

  I understood it, I just wasn’t ready to expose it. I’d been exposed enough.

  Bargaining for your life is never a position one wishes to be in. There are some powerful ramifications that come along with such a contract. Ask yourself what you would do to save your life? What would you exchange? Some are willing to exchange loved ones through betrayal and self-motivated decisions.

  I exchanged a loved one.

  I exchanged me for Me.

  The shame that permeated my willingness to part with almost everything that mattered was soul shattering. I’d agreed to the dirtiest of deals, the Lucifer of transactions. I’ll see your Cassandra and raise you a Cass.